SafestClaw 🐾

The zero-cost alternative to OpenClaw. No LLM required, though it is optional. No required API bills. Minimal attack surface. Runs on any machine.

You can simply type pip install safestclaw and it will download, please read install.md to understand what to do. You only want what you need, so install.md comes with the ML safestclaw and you can add any additional features we support with pip install. I run safestclaw like so python -m safestclaw which will load the command line interface. You can setup the system at anytime and make modifications by running python -m safestclaw setup. This is where you can choose if you want to use an LLM or stick with the ML actions. You can choose if you want to enable it as an mcp, use web ui and or telegram. If you don't use an LLM you have to learn from the /help documentation. Simple things like what is the weather in insert town name, will respond without an LLM, because it uses a weather api. If you type in news tech it will give you a summary from over fifty different sources of the tech news of the day. If you type in news it will provide a summary for the news in general and show you its sources. The thing that this solves is making actions auditable and only using an LLM when things actually require an LLM. Language models aren't needed nearly as much as people believe they are. There has been established ML ways to do things for sometimes a decade that people pay LLM providers for. This is a waste of money, so we make it so you don't have to waste thaat money. We provide a research tool research insert what you want to research and then choose arxiv, wolframalpha or any other source we support, so research lstm arxiv will return research from arxiv. This may require an LLM to work. You can blog without an LLM that will be saved as text files. You can do security audits of code without an LLM with safestclaw. You can use telegram and a localhost web ui WITHOUT an LLM. LLMs do make it easier so you don't have to memorize the documentation, but if you don't mind learning documentation you can get most of the features people rave about in openclaw for free.

We did huge updates for surpassing ⭐⭐two hundred and fifty stars⭐⭐. Our next update palooza will be at ⭐⭐four hundred stars⭐⭐

Why SafestClaw?

Full Comparison: SafestClaw vs OpenClaw

Features

🗣️ Voice Control

• Speech-to-Text — Whisper STT runs locally, no cloud transcription
• Text-to-Speech — Piper TTS for natural voice output, completely offline
• Voice-first workflow — Talk to SafestClaw like you would any assistant

🏠 Smart Home & Device Control

• Smart home integration — Control your connected devices
• Bluetooth device control — Discover and manage Bluetooth devices
• Network scanning — Device discovery on your local network

📱 Social Media Intelligence

• Twitter/X summarization — Add accounts, get summaries of their activity
• Mastodon summarization — Follow and summarize fediverse accounts
• Bluesky summarization — Track and summarize Bluesky feeds
• No API tokens needed for public content

📰 RSS News Aggregation

• 50+ preset feeds — Hacker News, Ars Technica, BBC, Reuters, Nature, and more
• 8 categories — Tech, World, Science, Business, Programming, Security, Linux, AI
• Custom feeds — Import any RSS/Atom feed
• Auto-summarization — Extractive summaries with sumy (no AI)
• Per-user preferences — Customize your news sources

🔒 Privacy & Security

• Self-hosted by default — Your data stays local unless you explicitly request external info (like weather)
• No API keys required — Core features work completely offline
• No cloud AI dependencies — No tokens sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google
• Minimal prompt injection surface — Core features (blogging, coding, commands) use rule-based parsing with zero LLM, so they're immune to prompt injection. Research and deep analysis can optionally use an LLM to synthesize sources — when enabled, content from external sources (arXiv abstracts, web pages) is fed to the LLM, which carries a minimal prompt injection risk. Phase 1 research (gathering/summarizing) never uses an LLM and is safe. We're transparent about this tradeoff.

📡 Multi-Channel

• CLI — Interactive command line with Rich formatting
• Telegram — Full bot integration
• Discord — Coming soon
• Slack — Coming soon
• Webhooks — Inbound and outbound support

⚡ Automation

• Command chaining — Combine actions naturally: "read my email and remind me at 3pm"
• Web crawling — Async crawling with depth limits and domain filtering
• Summarization — LexRank, TextRank, LSA, Luhn algorithms
• Reminders — Natural language time parsing with dateparser
• Shell commands — Sandboxed command execution
• File operations — Search, list, read files
• Cron jobs — Scheduled task automation
• Daily briefings — Weather, reminders, news from your feeds

📊 Text Analysis

• VADER Sentiment — Lexicon-based sentiment analysis
• Keyword Extraction — TF-IDF style extraction
• Readability Scoring — Flesch-Kincaid metrics

📧 Email Integration

• IMAP Support — Read emails from Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo
• SMTP Support — Send emails
• Standard protocols — No API keys required

📅 Calendar Support

• ICS Files — Import and parse .ics calendar files
• CalDAV — Sync from Nextcloud, Radicale, iCloud, Fastmail, Google (pip install safestclaw[caldav])
• Event filtering — Today, upcoming, by date range
• Chat commands — calendar today, calendar upcoming 14, calendar import ~/cal.ics, calendar sync, calendar calendars

📄 Document Reading

• PDF — Text extraction with PyMuPDF
• DOCX — Microsoft Word documents
• HTML/Markdown/TXT — Plain text formats

🔔 Notifications

• Desktop notifications — Cross-platform (macOS, Windows, Linux)
• Priority levels — Low, normal, high, urgent
• Rate limiting — Prevent notification spam

👁️ Optional ML Features

• NLP — spaCy named entity recognition (~50MB)
• Vision — YOLO object detection + OCR (~2GB)
• OCR — Tesseract text extraction from images (lightweight)

🌐 Localhost Web UI

• Single-page chat at http://127.0.0.1:8771/ — no CDNs, no JS framework
• Drives the whole engine — every action, every plugin, every command
• Loopback only — WebChannel refuses non-127.0.0.1 binds at construction
• Optional auth — Bearer token via channels.web.auth_token
• JSON API — /api/health, /api/actions, /api/help, /api/message, /api/history
• Run standalone: safestclaw web — Telegram auto-starts when enabled in config; other channels have their own commands (`sa